PRINCETON: Hinds memorial project to be completed

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Albert Hinds grew up and lived as a black man in a different Princeton than the one today, a segregated town that stayed that way well into the 20th century.
   Five years ago, the borough honored his service to the community by naming the plaza next to the Princeton Public Library after the 104-year-old who died in 2006. Now a mix of public and mostly private funds will complete the memorial project with two sets of open gates that will serve as artistic metaphor.
   ”These gates symbolize the openness between what was formerly two separate and distinct communities,” said former township Mayor James Floyd, a member of the Hinds Plaza Gates Committee, in an interview at the library Wednesday.
   ”These gates are symbolizing the coming together of the Princetons, not the township and borough (but) the segregated Princetons,” said fellow committee member Shirley Satterfield, a Princeton resident and local historian who leads history walking tours.
   The memorial could go in by the end of this year or at the very latest in April — the same month Mr. Hinds was born in 1902.
   Other elements of the project include plaques imbedded in the pavement and a website that will have biographical information about Mr. Hinds, the town and Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood where he lived. Also, visitors will be able to access an audio guide of the history of Mr. Hinds and the town, narrated by Mr. Floyd and Ms. Satterfield.
   Mr. Hinds was rooted in Princeton.
   ”His life was three blocks of Witherspoon Street,” said Ms. Satterfield, in reference to the house in which he was born and the school and the church he had attended.
   Ms. Satterfield said he went to the Witherspoon School for colored children, just as his mother had. Schools would not be desegregated in Princeton until 1948. During segregation, blacks in Princeton ran their own businesses, went to their own theater, churches and even YMCA.
   ”Mr. Hinds lived through all of that, and Mr. Hinds served this community,” said Mr. Floyd.
   During his lifetime, Mr. Hinds worked at whatever he could put his hands to. In an interview he gave a few years before his death, he recalled helping to pave Nassau Street — formerly a dirt road. Others of his jobs included driving a horse and buggy taxi, delivering milk, shining shoes for Princeton University professors and being an exterminator.
   ”He was an everything,” said Ms. Satterfield, who learned through her great-grandmother that she and Mr. Hinds are cousins.
   She recalled how the two of them would visit schools or other groups to talk about Princeton’s black community.
   ”I worked closely with Mr. Hinds,” she said. “He would take his cane or he would take his walker, and I would say, ‘Mr. Hinds, we’ve got to do our dog and pony show.’ “
   After his death, Ms. Satterfield felt something in town should be named in his honor; she went before Borough Council to make that request.
   The governing body selected the plaza, although there is nothing yet there with his name on it. The project, delayed for a few years, got back on track earlier this year.
   For the memorial, Montclair artist Tom Nussbaum was chosen.
   ”My goal in this project is to create a work of art that is visually appealing, and reflects the enthusiasm and energy that Mr. Hinds brought to his life,” he wrote in a 2010 description of the project.
   Mr. Floyd, who sat on the local zoning board with Mr. Hinds, recalled an expression Mr. Hinds had: “It’s always the right time to do the right thing,” a quote from Martin Luther King.
   Borough Council President Barbara Trelstad, chairwoman of the plaza committee, said the expression would be imbedded in the gates.